Bodies Machines:

1

• Bodies Machines
• Technologies of beauty
• Technologies of health women and medical
  technology technologies of reproduction

2

• Cyborg, as used for example by Donna Haraway
  (1991) and Adele Clarke (1998), means the
  intermingling of people, things (including
  information technologies), representations, and
  politics in a way that challenges both the
  romance of essentialism and the hype about what
  is technologically possible. It acknowledges the
  interdependence of people and things, and it
  shows just how blurry the boundaries between them
  have become.
• (Bowker Star, 1999)

3
Cyborg Representations Origins

• Ancient Greece in B.C. (Deus ex machina)
• 1800's ("Ghost" in the machine)
• Late 1900's (Miniaturization is about power)
• Present Machines are everywhere and they are
  invisible

4
Cyborg

• As the information systems of the world expand
  and flow into each other, and more people use
  them for more different things, it becomes harder
  to hold to pure or universal ideas about
  representation or information, about identity
• Representations of monsters / hybrids are a
  reflection of that experience of (ruptured)
  identity (imagined cyborgs in art and fiction,
  popular culture)
• Real cyborgs (technologies of health, beauty ...)

5
Cyborg

• Picture of possible unity
• Framework is rearrangement of social relations
  related to science technology
• Current movement from organic, industrial society
  to a polymorphous, information society

6
Analyses of Cyborg

• AAA annual meetings cyborg anthropology sessions
  (mid-1990s)
• Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1995)
• The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1985, 1991)
• historical images of cyborgs emerge at times of
  intense change that involve thinking of how
  humanity is impacted by technology (Gonzáles 1999)

7
Cyborg Source www.prairiecon.com accessed
Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah Oelker
8
Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
9
Cyborg Representations

• Grotesque images that involve imagining the
  relationships bw people and things that are
  interpenetrated
• Bad science fiction or crucial notion for
  understanding technoscience, and how the
  knowledge (of science and technology) is shaping
  lived experience

10
Source google search for cyborg accessed
Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah Oelker
11
Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
12
Cyborg Source google search for cyborg
accessed Sept. 25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah
Oelker
13
cyborg representations -- hybrid identities
http//www.scrippscollege.edu/dept/art/CTA/cy
borg.gif (go)
14
Cyborg Representations

• List the organic (human) and inorganic
  (technological) characteristics of cyborgs you
  encountered.
• What was your response to these beings?
• Are they monsters, hybrids?
• What are they not?

15
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Organic cyborg (monster of multiple species)
• Mechanical cyborg (techno-human amalgamation)
• Cyborg consciousness (abstract, amalgamated,
  hybrid)
• Cyborg body politics? -- Gendered cyborg?
  (social control over womans/mans body)
• Why are robots not cyborgs?

16
Cyborg Representations

• The notion of purity based on membership in a
  single, pristine racial, sexual, or even
  religious group does not hold in the
  borderlands (the margins) that is populated by
  cyborgs
• Cyborgs are the iconography of modern experience
  (not natural, but mediated through technology)
• Why do they reflect a process of rethinking human
  nature? (use examples from your own search)

17
pre-industrial industrial
post-industrial
18
autonomous automaton simulacrum
19
The dichotomies that reflect a shift from the
comfortable old hierarchicaldomination to the
new networks I call the informatics of
domination (Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
(1991), 161

• Representation
• Eugenics
• Hygiene
• Microbiology, tuberculosis
• Organic division of labour
• Sex
• Labour
• Mind
• Racial chain of being
• White Capitalist Patriarchy

• Simulation
• Population control
• Stress management
• Immunology, AIDS
• Ergonomics /cybernetics of labor
• Genetic Engineering
• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism
• Informatics of Domination

20
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Cyborg images appear when the current model of a
  human being does not fit a new paradigm -- a
  hybrid model of existence is required to
  encompass a new, complex and contradictory lived
  experience -- the cyborg body becomes the
  historical record of change in human perception
  in the realm of fantasy
• How is the cyborg body reflecting modern
  experience in each of the cases that are
  discussed by González?
• What is the habitat of each of these beings?

21
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Mechanical Mistress LHorlogère (18th century
  engraving body of a woman merged with an
  automaton) pre-industrial consciousness
• ideology of order, precision, and mechanisation
• infusion of technology into human lives
  (automatons optical devices devices for
  measuring time)
• the precision of mechanical clock system,
  regimentation is an ideal of mechanized identity
  that culminated in 19th century large-scale
  industrial production

22
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• 19th century preoccupation with mechanization and
  possibility that peoples identities and
  emotional lives become like machines
• automaton servant, toy, master?
• increasing regimentation of life, and human
  experience
• control of population statistics, censuses
• power relations (class distinctions gentleman /
  worker)

23
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Hannah Höch Das schöne Mädchen (1920) collage
• early 20th century experience of modernism a
  body in pieces
• allegory of modernization (chaotic vision of the
  rapid social and cultural change after WWI
  industrial growth iconography of mass culture)
• The figure of a woman reflects the experience of
  a modern woman (emancipated? subjugated?
  consumerized? empowered? commodity? customer?)

24
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Raoul Hausmann Tête Méchanique. Lésprit de
  notre temps (ca. 1921) assemblage of found
  objects
• early 20th century experience of modernism a
  mechanical mind
• cerebral concept of the modern experience
  representation of what has been displaced
• a new being for a new age (humanity is
  insufficient) needs a body imagined in terms of
  contradictions

25
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Phoenix Technologies Ltd. advertisement for
  Eclipse Fax (1993)
• late 20th century experience of modernism a
  gendered body of a futuristic Medusa (head of
  wires, blinded with technology bad boy fantasy
  prevalent in so many images of feminized
  cyborgs)
• touches upon cyborg body politics, exploring the
  consequences of a montage of organic bodies and
  machines

26
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Robert Longo All You Zombies Truth Before God
  (1990)
• late 20th century experience of modernism
  manifestation of the body at war in the theater
  of politics hybrid body male/female
• cyborg manifests human, animal, and mechanical
  sexual potency and violence, ironic (inversion of
  Delacroixs Liberty Leading People)
• What does this figure tell about the difference
  between cyborgs and people?

27
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• González cyborgs represent interface bw
  automaton autonomy
• historically connected to increasing
  pervasiveness of technology in organizing human
  lives (industrialization and modernization in the
  19th and 20th century)
• political implications of technology infusing
  human life (potential for domination, control,
  violence as well as control of nature, freedom
  ...)

28
Cyborg Representations Gonzáles

• Why are robots not cyborgs?
• Why is cyber- (as one of the most used prefixes
  of the 90s, signifying a world of computer
  dominance and disembodied experience) included in
  the notion of cyborg? (cyber-organism)

29
Bill Gates the Borg Source slashdot.org icon
accompanying Microsoft news items accessed Sept.
25, 2002 courtesy of Sarah Oelker